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Contemporaneous
to feminist consciousness-raising groups[1],
institutional analysis was born in France. It emerged from, while at the same
time overcoming, both ‘institutional’ pedagogy and psychotherapy. This birth
occurred in the midst of great social upheaval and a generalized crisis of
institutional power. According to institutional analysis, the “institution” is
the form (at first, hidden) adopted by the schemes of production and reproduction
of dominant social relations. The crisis of the institutional form opened a
space which institutional analysis intended to explore. This sort of analysis
starts from the institution itself in order to discover and analyze its
material base, its history and that of its members, its role in the technical
and social division of labor, its structural relationships, etc. How? Firstly,
by recognizing the false neutrality of the (psycho)analyst or pedagogue, and
the fact that any and all analytical or educational projects imply an
intervention. Second of all, liberating the ‘social word’, collective
expression and the “politics” (or even better, micropolitics) of desires, by implicating each and every one of the
members of the institution in the process of analysis. As Felix Guattari writes
in this regard:

“Neutrality is a trap: one is always
compromised. It is more important to be aware of this in order for our
interventions to be the least alienating as possible. Instead of conducting a
politics of subjection, identification, normalization, social control, semiotic
management of the people with whom we relate, it is possible to do the
opposite. It is possible to choose a micropolitics that consists in pressuring,
despite the fact that we’ve been conferred little strength, in favor of a
process of de-alienation, a liberation of expression, using ‘exits’, or rather
‘lines of flight’, with regards to social stratifications”. Also, “In order to
develop an authentic analysis [..] the main problem would not be
interpretation, but intervention. ‘What can you do to change this?’”[2].

However,
this is not the only way of linking politics to action by institutional
analysis. Given its origins in pedagogy and psychotherapy, this analysis
focuses on institutions such as the school and the hospital (especially
psychiatric). But, from the start, these institutions are understood not as
isolated spaces; rather, the entire institutional system is seen as
communication and articulated with the State. This leads to a direct
relationship between institutional analysis and political militancy: in the
last instance, the state will always resort to violence when the stability of
the institutional system is threatened. This makes “discovering” or analyzing
the institution impossible unless this implies some type of “confrontation” at
a particular moment, and experience
in the strong sense of the term –that is, the experience of action, of
militancy.

Even
if some literatures tend to exclude Felix Guattari as a member of the institutionalist
movement, this anomalous and prolific thinker, analyst and militant was the one
that coined the term “institutional analysis” around 1964/1965, during a
session of a study group that focused on institutional psychotherapy[3].
Guattari coined this term due to the necessity to differentiate this new trend
from two others: on the one hand, against the school led by Daumezon, Bonafé
and Le Guillant (who coined the expression “institutional psychotherapy” during
the French Liberation in World War II) that limited analysis to an internal
question within the walls of the psychiatric institution. This focus understood
the institution as an isolated entity with no relation to society in general,
believing that it was possible to de-alienate the social relations of the
hospital by limiting research to the institutional territory itself. On the
other hand, institutional analysis also distanced itself form the increasing
specialization of [psycho]analytical practice, that gave exclusive
responsibility to an “expert” person or group, who then gained an extraordinary
amount of power. “Analysis will only be useful when it ceases to be the task of
a specialist, of an individual psychoanalyst or even of an analytical team, all
of which constitute a formation of power. I believe that a process must be
produced that emerges from what I’ve called agenciamiento
--organization making-an-agent-of/empowerment of analytical enunciations [I
think is the French “agencement”, which is sometimes translated as
“assemblage”.]. This empowerment process is not composed solely of individuals,
rather it depends on particular social, economic, institutional,
micropolitical, … workings.”[4] In this same vein, institutional analysis
would consider social movements as agency-makers/empowerments of privileged
analytical enunciation. Examples of this would be found in the feminist and
free-radio movements.[5]

The
practice of institutional analysis would proliferate and feed off of the
experience of the magazine Recherches
and the FGERI (Federation of Insitutional Research and Study Groups), both of
which brought together psychiatric groups interested in institutional therapy,
groups of teacher from the Freinet movement[6],
students connected to the BAPU[7]
experience, architects, urbanists, sociologists, social psychologists…This
enriching input would lead to the incorporation of two vertices in the
analytical process: on the one hand, a “research on research”, that is to say,
an analysis that takes into account “the fact that researchers cannot comprehend
their object except under the condition that they themselves are organized, and
that they questions themselves about things that on the surface have nothing to
do with their object of study”[8];
on the other hand, the idea of “transdisciplinarity” in research, which allows
one to unblock false problems.

Additionally,
it was in this context that key notions were proposed that would later be
incorporated into the critical social sciences: analyzer, institutional
transfer, transversality…In particular, transversality would be the keystone
concept of analysis: “Analysis, in my opinion, consists in articulating, in
producing coexistence –not in homogenizing or unifying-, to provide a principle
of transversality, to succeed in making different discourses communicate
transversally […], discourses of distinct orders and not only general
theoretical discourses, rather micro-discourses as well, more or less babbling,
at the level of everyday life relations, interactions with space, etc.”[9]

Confronting
the faith in the practice of consciousness-raising (and much of marxist theory
and practice), and the importance of making what lies latent emerge into
consciousness, institutional analysis, due in large part to its roots in
psychotherapy and pedagogy, insists in the potential of the molecular level, in
the value of micro-discourses, in collective work on the economy of desire. In
this sense, much emphasis would be placed on the importance of the ‘analytical
vector’ of social struggles to the extent that this vector could help unblock
those same struggles. In this respect Guattari would write: “I’m convinced that
class struggles in the developed countries, the transformations in everyday
life, all the problems of molecular revolution, will find no solution unless, apart
from traditional theorizing, a very particular form and practice of theorizing
is developed, at the same time individual and of the masses, that in a
continuous manner, leads to a collective re-appropriation of all that concerns
the economy of desire. […] At the same time that one formulates what one
considers just, or one gets involved in a struggle that one sees as efficient,
the development of a type of ‘passage to the Other’ becomes necessary, an
acceptance of heterogeneous singularity, a militant anti-process, that
coincides with the analytical process.”[10]

The
history of the institutionalist movements would have two phases and May ’68
would constitute the turning point between them. The first phase would be
fundamentally French and its concrete practice would be carried out within the
interior of a particular institutional framework (a school, a clinic, …). After
May ’68 we find, on the one hand, in France a tendency that re-inscribes
institutional analysis in the terrain of specialist (whether university-based
or professional social psychologists). Institutional analysis would thus
convert itself into largely either a commercial or university product, under
the auspices of figures such as Georges Lapassade, René Lourau and Michel
Lobrot. The problem here would not the recuperation of a practice that emerged
in the heat of dynamics of social self-organization and critique, rather again-
as in the case of consciousness-raising- the transformation of institutional
analysis into a formalized and abstract ‘method’, or directly in the antipodes,
of the concerns, problems and worries from which the analysis was formulated.
On the other hand, outside France (especially in Italy and the United Kingdom)
the institutionalist movement would completely exit the institutional framework
in order to attack the very principles and bases of the institution. Together
with the countercultural movement of the seventies this branch of institutional
analysis would help to found anti-psychiatry and school-free education. Ivan
Illich, David G. Cooper and Franco Basaglia would be figures of reference in
this regard.[11]

Participatory Action-Research

Action Research or A+R (which later
on will be complemented with a P for participation) was born as a reaction to
the productivist and technicist model proper to R+D (research and development).
Action Research is the result of a confluence between critical schools of
social research and pedagogy (such as popular education, especially the
theories and experiences inspired by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed). These pedagogical experiences gain an
important presence in Latin America, being linked to processes of adult
education and community struggles for improving everyday life conditions.

PAR attempts to articulate research
and social intervention with local communities’ knowledges, know-hows and
needs. It considers ‘action’ as the main criterion to validate any theory,
prioritizing practical knowledges. The objectivity of these knowledges is
generated through the degree to which they were collectively produced, through
interpersonal dialogue together with a procedure that goes from concrete
elements (or realities) to the abstract totality, returning afterwards to the
concrete. By the time this knowledge returns and is reapplied to the concrete,
it is in a crystallized condition ready to generate action (thus the paradigm
of objectivity is transformed into reflexivity and dialogical engagement,
embracing two principles similar in ways to feminist epistemology). However,
not every action is valid in and of itself: the action that is expected to
emerge from a PAR process has to be collective and contribute to the
transformation of reality, generating a new and more just reality. This is one
other key aspect for the validation of the knowledge produced. Therefore, for
PAR, social (and transformative) praxis are at the same time, object and result
of the study[12].

Another key element distinctive of
PAR is its rupture with traditional relationships between subject (researcher)
and object (researched), which had been characteristic of classical
sociological research. From the moment one recognizes that every social subject
holds potential for action, there is a search for a process of co-research, in which different
subjects, with diverse know-hows or knowledges, relate to each other according
to ethical criteria. Those subjects that are from outside of the community or
the social reality under investigation should function as catalyzing elements, but never over determining the situation. This
requires an absolute transparency towards all the participants in the research
process. Also, it demands a constant articulation and feedback between the
technical/scientific knowledge (which normally comes from outside) and the
“popular knowledges” already existing in the community. This allows for
dynamics of formation and dynamics of self-confidence and (discursive and
reflexive) articulation of those knowledges that are usually not recognized.
This additionally requires permanent attention to the diverse planes of
subjectivity (researchers such as Tomas R. Villasante divide them into
manifest, latent and deep/profound planes of subjectivity[13]).

PAR emerged as a strong trend during
the mid sixties linked to popular education and grassroots activism in the
midst of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial revolutionary movements[14].
While most often associated with Latin America and its connections with
Freirian popular education, it soon becomes clear that PAR was a Third World
wide tool for radical organizing[15].
Besides Latin America, South Asia becomes an extremely important site for
experimentation with PAR (in particular India and Bangladesh), with PAR
processes occurring as well in different parts of Africa. Some of the most
prolific and militant figures to follow in tracing this genealogy include: Fals Borda from Colombia, Mohammad Anisar Rahman from
Bangladesh (currently director of the Society for Participatory Action of Asia,
in New Delhi); and Sithembiso Nyoni from Zimbabwe[16].
It is at this moment when it is claimed that “PAR has demonstrated itself to be
an endogenous intellectual and practical creation of the peoples of the Third
World”(Fals-Borda 1985:2). The culminating moment for the consolidation
and internationalization of PAR was the World Symposium held in Cartagena,
Colombia in 1977[17]. Since
then, the umbrella tradition of PAR has grown in internal diversity.

It was during this time of
effervescence of anti-imperialist struggles throughout parts of the Third World
then that PAR would sink its roots and challenge the epistemological bases of
the colonial social sciences (sociology, anthropology, etc.). In particular,
PAR became a tool to empower social struggles in rural areas and to build
strong ‘campesino’ movements. Though rural areas were where some of the most
impressive work took place, PAR also became a process of experimentation to
empower marginalized urban communities and their struggles over the spaces of
everyday life. It was this mixture of a PAR process and urban social agitation
that facilitated experimentations with PAR in parts of the global North. From the late sixties on, PAR will reach Europe[18]
and North America[19].

Action Research arrived in the
Iberian Peninsula during the eighties, through what was called dialectical
sociology developed mainly by Jesús Ibanez, Alfonso Ortiz and Tomas R.
Villasante. Introduced into this (Spanish state) geographical and historical
context, PAR would very rapidly, upon its introduction, be appropriated as a
tool of governmental co-optation. It is true that PAR, as a formalized process
of action-research which is often contracted by local administrations and
innovative companies, would become on many occasions a tool for consensus
making. Channeling and calming down any trace of social unrest, especially
during the 80s, in a context where the “silent majorities” started to look
disturbing, and it was necessary to make them speak in order to better govern
them. It is also certain though that many elements of PAR constitute a source
of inspiration to make research a tool of transformation[20]:
PAR’s initial approaches, some of its techniques and certain experiences of
articulation of modes of collective action coming from the analysis of the
practitioner’s own situations, and the combination of technical, theoretical
knowledges with other minor knowleges (especially when these participated not
due to an “invitation” by state institutions, but out of the “irruption” of
local communities –this distinction is made by Jesus Ibanez-).

Militant Research
Yesterday and Today

Inquiry and Co-Research.
Class composition, self-valorization. The personal is political. Departing from the self. Transversality.
Micropolitics and the economy of desires. Liberation of expression. Lines of
flight. Action-Research. All of these concept-tools will reappear in the
contemporary initiatives that are seeking to articulate research and action,
theory and praxis. The same will happen with many of the concerns, themes and
problems that we just traced in these historical examples. They resonate with
current initiatives but in a strange way, especially due to a radically
different context. While the experiences just reviewed were born in a climate
of huge social effervescence, linked to massive social movements, the current
terrain in which the majority of contemporary initiatives of militant research
are inserted, appears more mobile, changing, dispersed, and atomized. What do
these then have in common, the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, apart from a series of
expressions that the last ones borrow from the first ones, though in unorthodox
ways, thus becoming their illegitimate daughters?

Let’s see. First of all,
both share a strong materialist
inspiration. Against all idealism and all ideology, this inspiration looks for
the encounter between the thing and the name, between the common thing and the
common name. This is to say: instead of relying only on interpretations from
books or pamphlets (usually frozen), it is about contrasting these with
elements coming from a concrete reality, and starting from there, to proceed
from the concrete to the abstract, always to come back to the concrete and the
possibility of its transformation. Thus, action and practice will be granted
absolute primacy in all of these research experiences. It is no longer that we
have been interpreting the world for a long time and now is the time to change
it (Marx dixit), but rather that the
very interpretation of the world is always linked to some kind of action or
practice. The question will be then, what kind of action: one that conserves
the status quo or produces a new
reality.

Second of all,
apprehending the concrete elements as well as intervening on them are produced
through that sensitive machine that we know as the body, a surface where the
inscription of a subjectivity, that lives and acts in a concrete social
reality, occurs. That is why we can say that another common element is the
critique of all disembodied theory, that pretends to speak from a neutral place
of enunciation from where everything can be seen. No, sirs: thought, by
necessity, passes through the body, and therefore, thought is always situated,
implicated, taking a side. The
question then is: on which side should
we position ourselves/are we positioned? Or, in other words: with whom do we think? With workers’
struggles, with dynamics of social conflict and cooperation, with women, with
“crazy people”, with children, with local communities, with subjugated groups,
with initiatives of self-organization…

The third of the common
elements is the certainty that all new knowledge production affects and
modifies the bodies and subjectivities of those who have participated in the
process. The co-production of critical knowledge generates rebellious bodies.
Thinking about rebellious practices provides/gives value and potency to those
same practices. Collective thinking engenders common practice. Therefore, the
process of knowledge production is inseparable from the process of subject
production or subjectification and vice versa. It is of little worth to go around
telling (commanding) people what they should think, how they should interpret
their own lives and the world. One cannot be certain that this type of
transmission of information from consciousness to consciousness might produce
something, or liberate in any sense. That form of transmission is too
superficial, and holds disdain for the potential of encounter between different
singularities and the strength of thinking and enunciating in common. It is
from this concern that an interest in an articulation between collective forms
of thought and research emerged: the practices of co-research,
self-consciousness and transverslity all go in this general direction.

Finally, the last common
element that we can identify is the priority being granted to goals and processes
over any kind of formalized method. Method, when abstracted from the context
and concerns from which it was born, can become a corset that prevents a
genuine connection between experience and thought, analyses and practices of
transformation. It becomes a kind of ideological screen that blocks any
displacements that can occur due to new problems and concerns that emerge in
the midst of a research process. Actually, we could say that processes of
militant research are capable of putting real
operations into place that are above all methods. Militant research is, in
this sense, always, an open trip, in which we know the origin and how it
started, but we do not know where it will finish.

Effectively,
all these common elements between experiences of the past and current
initiatives are appropriated by these last ones in hybrid, babbling, stumbling
and new ways. As mentioned before, the context is different. Many of forms of
militant research or action-research of the present are formulated, in fact, in
an effort to break with some of the identitarian and sectarian logics of the
80s and the 90s, especially in the global north, that could freeze real
conflicts. It also tries to break with the voluntarist activism that
characterized those “years of winter”, as well as its counterpoint, a
dispassionate vision of knowledge distanced from the vital, productive,
affective and power-based contexts. In the context of an atomized social
reality, where even strong communities seem to have disintegrated forever and the
large mobilizations appear and disappear without leaving apparent solid traces,
the issue of the “passage to the Other”, the relationship with ‘Others’ becomes
central in order to generate a common thought-action which does not remain in
the small ‘us’ of a discrete group or grupuscule.

In this new context, and beyond
possible affiliations with the past, it is possible to identify three current
tendencies of articulation between research and militancy, with multiple points
of connection and resonance among them, as well as specific problems to each
one. As a finale to this prologue, let’s try to introduce them in a summarized
(being, of course, very reductive), in an effort to draw a small cartography of
militant research today[21]:

1) On the one hand, we find a series
of experiences of knowledge production about/against the mechanisms of
domination, combining a critique of the experts’ systems, with a fostering of
minor knowledges. Thus, they are able to initiate collective processes of
knowledge production, instead of the dominant tendency of individualizing and
privatizing knowledges (through legal mechanisms of patents and copyrights or
the necessity to build up a curricular trajectory [CV] in one’s own name).
Within this framework, we can identify the collective construction of
cartographies linked to processes of mobilization[22].
There is also the combination of expert and minor knowledges produced by
experiences such as Act UP[23]
and more classical but nonetheless important initiatives, based on research for
critical reporting purposes developed by activist groups that intervene in
those social terrains that are submitted to especially crude forms of
structural violence[24].
The international conference celebrated in Barcelona in January 2004, under the
title of Investigacció. Jornades de
Recerca Activista, constituted an important encounter of this kind of
experience.[25]

2) On the other hand, it is possible
to identify a set of initiatives that pursue the production of thought from the
very practices of social transformation, from its internal dynamics, in order
to boost and promote those same practices. How?: through a virtuous procedure
from practice to theory to practice, sometimes kicked off by the singular
encounter between dissimilar subjectivities[26],
and other times initiated by a people that participate in the same practices
that they intend to reflect upon[27].

3) Finally, we could talk about
those initiatives that take research as a lever for interpellation,
subjectification and political re-composition. How?: using the mechanisms of
the survey, interview and discussion group as an excuse to talk with Others and
between themselves, to challenge the distances produced in a hyper-fragmented
social space. Those mechanisms can be used to speak of one’s own reality, in
search of common notions that describe it; in search of forms of resistance,
cooperation and flight that pierce it, providing a metropolitan materiality to
the Zapatista proposition of “walking while asking”[28].

The gross and still clumsy
traces of this cartography need to be submitted to the critical eyes of
multiple militant-researchers. These lines are being drawn on a very concrete
sheet of paper: a context of a rich, hybrid and virtuoso social composition, with a strong demand for transformation,
and in search of re-appropriating its own capacity to create worlds. With this
goal, this cartography invents and fine tunes tools with which to interrogate
itself and others, interrogate the reality in which it is inscribed, fastening
itself to this reality’s surface and maybe shaking it. Some of its basic raw
materials are the word, the image and the practice of relating oneself.

[6] A pedagogical movement of cooperative and experimentary schools. It
was founded by the French communist teacher Célestine Freinet at the end of the
twenties. The movement would reach international dimensions.

[10]Ibid., p. 105. The
articulation of the molecular revolutions with an authentic mass social
revolution would become the question that most preoccupied Félix Guattari after
May ’68.

[11] On the history and some experiences of institutional analysis one
book of reference (in Spanish) is the edited volume by Juan C. Ortigosa (ed.) El
análisis institucional. Por un cambio de las instituciones, Campi Abierto Ediciones, Madrid, 1977. In that same volume see the articles by Félix Guattari and the
CERFI.

[12] As an interesting aside, Action Research developed clear
connections with French institutional analysis, especially with the
‘formalized’ version developed by Lapassade, Lourau and Lobrot, and key
concepts such as ‘analyzer’and ‘transversality’ were shared

[14] Note of the translators: the two following paragraphs were not in
the original text.

[15] The movement of PAR in the global South has been interpreted as
counter power constituting an “ insurrection of
subjugated knowledges” by Arturo Escobar (1984) “Discourse and Power in
Development: Michel Foucault and the Relevance of his work to the Third World”
en Alternatives X:377-400

[16] For more information see Orlando Fals-Borda (1985) [1988] Knowledge and People’s Power: Lessons with
Peasants in Nicaragua, Mexico and Colombia. New Delhi: Indian Social
Institute; Orlando Fals Borda and Aisur Rahman (1991) Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory
Action-Research. New
York: The Apex Press.

[19] Two main centers dedicated to participatory
action research currently active in North America are the International Council
for Adult Education based in Toronto, directed by Budd L. Hall. It is also the
publisher of Convergence a quarterly
journal in the broad field of adult education and PAR in general. In the US,
Highlander Research and Educational Center in Tennessee is one of the oldest
(1932) and most active, with renowned figures in the field of PAR as John
Gaventa. For a comprehensive overview of initiatives and centers in the US see Community-Based Research in the United
States a report by Loka Institute released in 1998, pdf document on line.

[20] For an excellent review of the basic features of PAR see Elena
Sánchez Vigil, “Investigación-acción-participativa” in TrabajoZero, Dossier Metodológico sobre coinvestigación
militante, Madrid, September 2002, pp.3-8. For a more exhaustive analysis
of the context in which PAR emerged, as well as a review of its epistemological
and methodological bases, including interesting examples see Luis R. Gabarrón
and Libertad H. Landa, Investigación
Participativa, Cuadernos Metodológicos, n.10, CIS, Madrid, 1994.

[21] This
cartography is the same as that presented in Sánchez, Pérez, Malo and
Fernández-Savater, “Ingredientes de una onda global”, cit. This was produced in
Madrid, thus its tentative, partial and provisional character. Some have read
this cartography as if it were a taxonomy of militant research, that highlights
a series of models of this sort of research from which one would have to pick.
This piece was never intended to be understood that way. Rather this chapter
was meant to be a kind of orientation diagram that can bring one into contact
with the practices (each one quite different from the others) that participated
in the book Nociones Comunes, of
which this text is the Prologue. The desire of this chapter remains precisely
that then, a prologue that introduces the reader to the various practices
contained therein.

[23] This organization of people with AIDS was formed in the US after
the ‘explosion’ of the “AIDS crisis”. It has a strong presence in France as
well. In this organization medical knowledge is combined with the knowledge of
the organized members with AIDS, as well as their networks of family members
and friends. For more information see http://www.actupny.org and http://www.actupparis.org. In the Spanish state, we can find similar examples where different
kind of knowledges are combined. The experience of Laboratorio Urbano is focused on the urbanists’ and architects’
knowledge is combined with from neighborhood knowledge and squatter knowledge,
all making alliances in order to build an urbanism from the bottom-up, in contact
with the direct experience of inhabiting the city (http://www.laboratoriourbano.tk).
The experience of Grupo Fractalidades en
Investigación Crítica combines social-psychological knowledge, migrant knowledges
and activist knowledges in order to develop projects of social research (http://psicologiasocial.uab.es/es/node/193)